Did Voldemort love Bellatrix? Voldemort would say, “what childish dream is this, little boy?”, the books say “maybe”.
I don’t know how much of JKR’s reluctance to have a woman tortured by a man in her books plays a role, but Voldemort never tortured Bellatrix, as far as we know. He punished Lucius with physical blows, yet Bellatrix always emerged unscathed. He considered her his best lieutenant, despite her mistakes. He saved Bellatrix at the Ministry, gave her a Horcrux, the sword even, and renewed his trust in her despite her failures. In short, Voldemort values and respects Bellatrix. She seems to benefit from, at the very least, some special treatment from him. He prefers Bellatrix over everybody else. It raises the question of Voldemort’s true capacity for love, and more particularly, of his feelings for Bellatrix.
This theme resurfaces strongly at the end of the books, as love represents the central theme of the Harry Potter books. As we know, Voldemort agreed to spare Lily, even though she was Muggle-born. He doesn’t understand Severus’s attraction to her, but he doesn’t mock him for it either. He clearly understands one’s attraction to a woman, even if he reduces it to lust. However, when Voldemort claims Severus didn’t love Lily, just lusted after her, he indirectly acknowledges, maybe unknowingly, that loving her would have been more damning for Severus, a clear indication of his betrayal. As a result, it’s an acknowledgement that love is a powerful emotion.
It’s not trivial that this conversation about love versus lust happens just after Voldemort lost control over his magic at the moment of Bellatrix’s death, with whom he most probably had a sexual relationship (I’m being charitable here as their sexual relationship is canon, but whatever).
We know how mirrored Voldemort, Severus and Harry are in the books. It’s also interesting that defending Ginny, Harry’s love interest, is the reason Bellatrix died. The echoes of Severus, Voldemort and Harry’s love interests being so closely juxtaposed at the final denouement of a saga about the power of love makes us wonder about Voldemort’s true feelings for Bellatrix. It’s my belief he died thinking he only felt lust for Bellatrix, but I think what is implied here is that, just as he was mistaken about Severus’s feelings for Lily, he is very mistaken about his own feelings for Bellatrix.
Maybe he didn’t understand Bellatrix’s feelings for him either, but that’s not what is addressed in this passage. No one questions Lily’s love for Severus or Ginny’s love for Harry. The topic here is about Voldemort, Severus and Harry’s capacity for love and what it brought about in their lives, in their trajectories.
Contrary to Harry, who understood the power of love, Voldemort has been unable to grasp what it means his entire life. He thinks love is foolish, stupid, at best just a leverage to manipulate people.
I think Bellatrix’s role in the narrative is not simply to be a zealous follower. Barty Crouch Jr already fills this purpose, and the theme is explored more fully through Regulus’s tragic story. Bellatrix has a bigger role, she’s much more important than any other Death Eater in the books.
I believe that if JKR chose to introduce a character such as Bellatrix—proud, strong, passionate, attractive, evil and twisted—the main purpose was to present the reader with a character who had the capacity to love Voldemort, but also a character that Voldemort could be attracted to.
Very few people could fall in love with Voldemort. It requires a certain folly, perhaps. Barty loved Voldemort like a father, but Bellatrix loved him like a lover. Although Bellatrix is not just a lunatic, as some people say, her love for Voldemort is indeed totally crazy. She loves him despite his evil nature and his snake-like appearance. She loves him unconditionally, as far as the reader knows. She loves him and she wants him, despite losing all her privileges and spending more than a decade in the worst prison in the world because of him. It’s a sacrifice that requires a very strong devotion. Bellatrix also needed to be a resilient chatacter to bear the toxic and destructive nature of Voldemort.
For Voldemort to like Bellatrix, she needed to be special: more powerful than most, more beautiful too. She had to be from the purest of all wizarding families.
Not an easy character to create, how do you create a character who is in love with Voldemort and not totally dismissed by him in a realistic way? The answer is Bellatrix Black Lestrange. Maybe the most iconic female villain of all times.
Why does JKR need a Bellatrix in her books? JKR doesn’t hint at their twisted, asymmetrical dynamics to be misogynistic towards women. It’s stupid and simplistic to think this way. I believe that JKR wants to make a point.
It shows that Voldemort was totally, unreservedly, categorically unredeemable, to a degree that it would not be morally reprehensible for her main character, a champion of love, to kill him. If Voldemort had never had access to love, being an orphan rejected by the world, it would have given him an excuse. It would have left a dark spot on Harry’s act. But Voldemort had one person loving him, no matter how toxic and obsessive that love was. He was still loved, and he himself was not unable to love.
Yet again, a person who is unable to love cannot really be condemned for thinking love is stupid. But a man who decides consciously that love is useless, weak and stupid despite being loved and feeling love himself… it’s even worse. It’s not forgivable. There’s no excuse. Yes, he was unloved as a baby. Voldemort was not born evil. His circumstances shaped him, but his choices condemned him. (It’s such a Catholic reading of evil by the way, a bit surprising for an author who is not Catholic, but I digress).
JKR explains evil, but doesn’t excuse it. Voldemort was not a monster who could not love. If Dumbledore calls him Tom, if Harry calls him Tom during this scene, it’s to remind him and the reader that he’s really just a man. A human. A human who decided he would destroy love in everybody he met and even in himself. He chose evil.
Voldemort is a human who made mistakes that cost him his life, and his number one mistake was to misunderstand love.
Harry does warn Voldemort at the very end. He asks Voldemort to try and feel remorse, which doesn’t amuse Voldemort. He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t make fun of the little boy then. It scares him. As if Voldemort was in fact conscious of the power of love. He knows right away that love is the reason he’s been facing setbacks: with Lily’s sacrifice, Severus’s loyalty, and now perhaps Harry’s capacity to kill him.
This is why, at Hogwarts, in this final scene, I think the reader is supposed to wonder at Voldemort’s reaction to Bellatrix’s death, at his repeated apparent scorn for love despite, quite clearly, fearing it. Voldemort is conflicted. He wants to dismiss love, but he’s unsure.
I think that the reader is supposed to question the idea that Voldemort was not really able to love. As Harry said, he can’t understand love, but can he truly be incapable of feeling it? Should we question the idea that perhaps Bellatrix’s love was not just lust, and also that his special treatment of her was not just lust, especially when he’s been so cataclysmically wrong about Severus’s true feelings for Lily? On the matter of love, Voldemort is always wrong.
There was hope for Voldemort. He could have been saved, but he rejected love, and it’s his greatest sin. Just like Satan, who rejected God’s love out of pride and ambition and was damned as a result. It’s because he was loved by God that Satan’s betrayal is unforgivable.
Honestly, I don’t think there’s another valid explanation for Bellatrix’s relevance in the books: first, for dying at that particular moment, and second, for eliciting such a strong reaction in Voldemort.
Sure, Bellatrix represented the Death Eaters in this scene, and her death shows how things were deteriorating for Voldemort. It’s an obvious clue that he’s losing. But he could have just screamed and tried to kill Molly. It happened before. When he’s angry, Voldemort screams and attacks. But the loss of control of his magic? I thought a long time ago that it was the accumulation of setbacks: his Horcruxes, Nagini, and now Bellatrix. But it could have been written differently: Bellatrix dying first and then Neville destroying Nagini, which would have been Voldemort’s last drop over his sanity. But JKR obviously thought it was more meaningful if Voldemort lost control over Bellatrix’s death. And narratively, it is definitely more meaningful if Voldemort reacts to a person’s death than to his own soul’s and favourite pet’s destruction.
So really, I’m asking you: why explode with the force of a bomb? Why Bellatrix? Why do Harry and Voldemort talk about a powerful kind of magic called love, and about the difference between lust and love, less than a minute after Voldemort’s explosive accidental magic?
“Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing.”
I find it interesting that the sentence describing Voldemort’s dead body ends with the word “unknowing”. It seems it is Voldemort’s greatest fault: just a man who refused to know love. A man who didn’t recognise love. Perhaps, just a man who didn’t know that he, too, could love.
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